After months of leaks and speculation, Amazon unveiled its ‘Fire Phone’ smartphone. The new phone has a 4.7-inch screen, a 13-megapixel camera and unlimited photo storage in cloud, as well as a 3-D like effect where the images move where you do.

The phone will be available July 25, and sells for $649 to $749 with no contract.

We’re in Seattle and live-blogging the announcement, and will bring you all of the news, photos and analysis in real time. (Sorry, unlike Apple WWDC keynote or Microsoft Surface Pro 3 announcement, there is no live video stream from Amazon.) Follow along and tell us what you think in the comments.

Thanks for stopping by the Amazon live blog. The company isn’t streaming live video, so we’ll get you the headlines and our thoughts as soon as the news is available. The event is scheduled for 1:30 p.m. ET, so come back then. And always feel free to tell us what you are thinking in the comments.

It’s not clear what role, if any, the Amazon customers are going to play in today’s event. But I have to give Amazon credit for attempting to innovate on the idea of these launch events. Now if only they had a live stream …

It’s not just a matter of new bells and whistles. Samsung has previously loaded up its Galaxy phones with lots of them, including eye tracking and no-touch operation. But it actually scaled back on them (or turned them off by default) in its latest Galaxy S5.

Apple and Samsung have such a grip on the smartphone market, I wonder how Amazon intends to succeed. There are so many other phones that haven’t really caught on — Facebook Phone, Moto X, Nexus, etc.

We’ve heard a lot about the 3-D and eye-tracking tech, and that’s all well and good. But I think Amazon would have to do something practical that makes people’s lives easier — remove e-commerce friction for Prime customers, or all customers — or go cut-throat on cost. And getting Prime customers as the early adopters through sweet incentives wouldn’t hurt.

There is another thing Amazon has that those others you mentioned don’t have, Brian: a massive sales channel. Amazon doesn’t require getting cuddly with cellphone store sales people or Best Buy clerks.

For all of the talk of fancy 3-D, I think people just want to know the meat-and-potato details: what’s the price, how big is the screen, how good is the camera, how long does the battery last. As much as people like to see a new form-factor, there is only so much you can do with a slab of metallicy glass. The bar for uniqueness is high there. But with several cameras on the phone (allegedly), Amazon is going for something.

A few readers weighed in on the comments tab. Here is a piece of one response to Geoff’s question about needing to hold the device:

With an iPhone – I’ll buy it online without blinking because it’s a ‘known-entity.’ With an Amazon phone? Barring an overwhelming barrage of extremely positive reviews, I’d absolutely need to play with it first …

While we are waiting, allow me to belatedly introduce our live bloggers. We have Geoffrey Fowler, one of our Personal Technology columnists. Greg Bensinger covers Amazon for the WSJ. Wilson Rothman is our editor for Personal Technology news and reviews. Joanna Stern, another Personal Technology columnist, is firing away on Twitter and we’re embedding some of her tweets here. Brian Fitzgerald (that’s me) is a deputy editor in the Journal’s global tech bureau.

Makes sense to me that Bezos is building the case for why Amazon should not only be in the hardware business, but why it should keep releasing new products. So many people still think of it as an online e-commerce business. (And it is.)

So far, the unlimited photo storage is the thing I want to know more about. That should send all others on their heels. The idea that we were heading toward free/unlimited has been out there, but this puts it front and center. What are the conditions? Is this just for Prime people …

We’re hearing about Amazon’s tight integration of its own services in its new Fire Phone. That tends to annoy some in Silicon Valley who prefer open ecosystems. But dedicated Amazon customers will undoubtedly love it.

The idea: Fire Phone is just another reason to be an Amazon Prime faithful.

Bezos is now demoing a new service called “Firefly” that can recognize products just with the phone’s camera, and then add them to your shopping cart. (Amazon added a similar service to its iPhone app earlier this year.)

Firefly can also listen to songs and add them to your shopping cart, or start a playlist on a music app.

Bezos is explaining how technically hard it is to make Firefly work in the real world, where there are wrinkles and bends and other problems. Much of that hard work happens in Amazon’s growing cloud service.

I can’t wait to see this tech first-hand. I don’t have a problem with parallax, but I wonder if the extra hardware horsepower that Amazon is throwing at this will make a big difference — taking it from “something’s not quite right” to “that is so natural that I can’t tell I am being duped by tech.”

This tech also needed to know how far away the phone is from the face, so Amazon added more cameras — four in total. Even if you hold your fingers over some of the cameras, the phone still has the two needed to get a sense of depth.

The cameras also have infra-red sensors so they can work when you’re looking at your phone in the dark. (That’s for me, when I wake up in the morning.)

Another one Bezos’s highlights: In messaging, turn the photo to the right, and a view of recent photos comes up. Tap one, press send and it is off. “I challenge you to do this on your current phone.” Bezos says.

Wow, this is premium pricing that positions the Fire Phone as a high-end device right up there with the flagship phones from Samsung and Apple. Those two have left nothing but scraps for others trying to crack the premium market. Maybe the 3-D makes it worth, but I’d be surprised if people switch allegiances based just on that.

I am torn over these short-period discounts. To me, 12 months of free Prime just hook me in, and then I am forking over money a year from now. If I end up loving the service, I guess I should have no complaints.

Thanks to everyone for stopping by — especially for all of the thoughtful comments. (There were many!) We’ll have our main article on the news updated by Greg a few more times. And our Personal Tech team is getting some video together right now and will have a roundup of the most important features shortly. Stay tuned!

This phone is awesome. Need a discount code? Just google DROY DEAL BUDDY - They have a gold box on the site that will spit out a discount code of any product on Amazon that you enter (just type in Amazon Fire Phone accessories or something). Really neat and I use it all the time and save big on these cases and other products using this tool.

5:06 pm June 18, 2014

Matthew Marlowe wrote:

I've been an Amazon customer for almost 18 years now, am subscribed to prime, and have numerous kindles and kindle fires that I share with my kids. I'd be fine dropping all of the family android phones and switching to amazon versions if a) Amazon had better support for subaccounts (I don't want my kid to have his own amazon account, but I do occasionally want to authorize purchases for him and have Amazon keep a history of his purchases and recommend things he might like - I don't want the purchases and books/apps I buy for him impacting my own profile/recommendations). I'd also like to specify which books he has access to on his kindle/etc. For a phone, I'd expect better support for family communication, the ability to put the phone on a cheap family plan (aka sprint), and the ability to locate the phone if it got lost. The built in camera and unlimited storage seems to make great sense....The at&t exclusivity is a killer. I'm fighting enough with the extortion pricing for 3/4g connectivity from at&t for Amazon's existing fire tablets.